Meeting Maung-Maung

I think the theme of Iyer’s Meeting Maung-Maung is gratitude. Iyer showed Maung-Maung was poor through describing Maung-Maung’s look, his home, and his stories. However, Maung-Maung was not living as a poor man. His job was a tour guide, riding a trishaw although he had an undergraduate mathematics degree, but his is grateful that he could know more people and learn English from this job. He did not have any valuable belongings, but he was grateful that he could collect letters from the tourists he had helped and treasured them. Furthermore, he wanted to express his gratitude to his parents, wanted them to attend his graduation, even though his parents were upset about his doing and he would need a long time to save money. Maung-Maung was grateful with what he had and believed in himself. Iyer, thus, wrote about Maung-Maung to suggest an attitude we should have towards our own life.

I love how Iyer first narrated questions he had in his head, then, instead of answering them in his perspective, he put the dialogue right after as the answer. Such as in the beginning when he was suspicious about the motive for Maung-Maung to give him the jade, he asked the question “What did he want?” followed by Maung-Maung’s quote “I want you…to have something so you can always remember me.” It not only showed the personality of the character, made it more alive, but also presented a more efficient respond compare to writing it in the author’s own words. I also love how Iyer used other situation to describe the scene in the story, such as how Maung-Maung passed the English dictionary “as gently as if it were his Bible,” or how Iyer was confused and felt “as uncertain as an actor walking through a play he hasn’t read.”